Most of the libraries are sampled are 5-10 years old, for the most part.
Not sure if you just consider them "feature complete" or if thats a bad thing (mix of both?) but it does mean most are not written in ES Module syntax, which can bloat bundles potentially
I'm getting real sick of the state of npmjs.org and the lack of ES modules. Or, the lack of documentation on ES modules. So many examples, even for brand new 2022 libraries, show using require() and other gross syntax. It's simply unacceptable in <current year> that require, commonjs, etc are being used.
Take, for example, the yargs module. Somehow, a very popular library. Nowhere in the docs does it show a <working> example of how to import it as an ES module.
Worse still, the typescript typings are all wrong. For example: await yargs.parseAsync() shows as valid TS as the typings indicate that is a function. In reality, you get a runtime error because that function simply does not exist on that object. It's a mess and I cannot wait for Deno to become more popular.
The first one that showed was a wrapper on localstorage, not sure why we'd need one of those but anyhow I looked at the code, no update since 2018. I spend a lot of time at work trying to minimise the amount of unnecessary crap we pull from npm explaining people that gaining 2 minutes by npm install something might deserve us in the long run but that's a massive uphill battle. The leftpad is a great example especially since there's a standard function for it (padStart) but most frontend people I am in contact with ignore those standard and first start by npm install whatever is available
My current customer has a designer, who claimed that we used Lottie Script[0] for animations all over the site, and we needed an animation to nudge the user to change from portrait to landscape. The animation was rotating an svg, and changing opacity on some svg children. It could all be done in pure html/svg and css, but we almost ended up bloating our, already huge bundle with all this Lottie stuff. My colleague did not consider that the designer did not know what he was talking about. Luckily this was caught in a PR.
Ironically, where I work, multiple copies of momentjs, each embedding the full folder of it's own language files, is the biggest space waster in our final webpack build.
Not OP, but binding data to elements is pretty nice (how $("#thingy").select2() always works on the same instance of the plugin without me having to store a reference somewhere).
Also things like fade and animate for when CSS transitions aren't enough and the ability to perform operations on multiple elements without a look are very convenient.
An oldie but a goodie. The site has been around since 2011. What’s great about this site is the general idea that you don’t necessarily need a framework (ie React) for everything.
Not sure if you just consider them "feature complete" or if thats a bad thing (mix of both?) but it does mean most are not written in ES Module syntax, which can bloat bundles potentially